Friday, October 14, 2011

Of Pigs and People

I hate to say it but it's true, people are pigs.  In no way do I intend to demean pigs, who are clean, intelligent animals, by comparing them to people.  Instead I use "pig" as it has come to mean a person who is crude, uncouth, dirty, and gluttonous. 


I know about the public because my house backs up to relatively busy street.  The noise is nearly non-existent at night but during the day  the traffic is fairly regular.  The street is about 8 feet below the top of my ubiquitous slump stone wall.  This morning I looked out of my bedroom window which overlooks the top of my patio cover and thus the street and discovered trash from a fast food place on top of the patio cover! Over the years we've had lots of odd trash thrown over the wall. Shell casings, food, bottles, and regular paper garbage. But to lob a bag of fast food trash onto the roof took a good arm and a purpose.


Somehow the trash in my yard always makes me wonder if we've been targeted for some reason. I think, "why my house?", "what did my dogs or I do to make me a target"?  That's ridiculous I know. But it is disconcerting to find strange things in your yard and to think that some unknown person chose your house as his/her garbage dump.


I wonder, what kind of person throws his garbage into some stranger's yard? Female, male, young, or old? I have my suspicions but I like to give equal consideration to all people. So in honor of  equal opportunity I put at least 75% of the public in the "pig" category. If you could see the large park near my house after a nice weekend I think you would agree.  A pig sty is cleaner. And I put my money on the intelligence of pigs over the public any day.

Wednesday, October 12, 2011

Blogging for Kids

Having a blog myself, I thought it would be great if my fifth and sixth graders could get in on the action. My teaching partner (younger and more technically savvy than I) found a safe site that is private and can only be viewed by the administrator (me), the kids, and their parents. So every Monday we troop into the computer lab and write blogs. Of course first I had to educate them on what a blog is.  Texting they get, blogging was new. So they go to a computer, type in the web address find their name and type their password. Ready, set, they can write their own blogs, read their classmates' blogs and even write comments.  They get as much satisfaction out of reading other people's work as they do writing their own.

Doing this is more work for me which I neglected to consider beforehand, naturally.  I have to read and approve every post and every comment before it can be published to the site. The blogs are pretty much limited to the number of kids but the comments...yikes! These kids love to comment. I might have 26 blogs to read and 50 comments. Most comments are kind and supportive I have to admit.  But I have one child on the autistic scale who is honesty personified. I have to trash some of his comments like: "LAME!" or "Your grammar is bad!" or even "Why did you do something so stupid?"  I may agree with his comments but in this case honesty is not the best policy.

I'm beginning to be afraid that our blogging is not long for the web. Just this week when we logged onto the site we started getting an automatic message from the school district that that site was restricted and could not be accessed.  It did let us on, though that message remained in the background. If it does eventually kick us out I'll be royally pissed off. The district blocks so many sites already it's hard to use the internet as a research or teaching tool.

But in this case the site is safe and private and supervised so I can't see the problem. I think, wait, I know, the district just uses a broad hand to block sites without knowing anything about them. There is a lot of teaching that can go on while blogging. My kids already text each other and use Facebook without much instruction or supervision. So this is a great way for them to learn some good rules about using the internet for social exchanges.

The rules I have for blogging are good rules for all public internet sites.  No trashing other people, no bad language, read it over before you send it, and be positive and kind toward others. No naming names either. Using people's names might be ok for this site because it's closed but they need to get in the habit of maintaining their privacy as well as the privacy of others online.

Their blogs are also good writing tools.  They see first hand why spelling and punctuation and complete sentences are important when they read or try to read each other's unedited writing. They are starting to be more careful with spelling at least and recognize poor writing when they see it. It makes for a few good teaching moments. Writing skills taught with a light hand, very 21st century.

Most of all though, blogging is a good way to get kids interested in writing. They can write about whatever they want within certain limits. And they can write as little or as much as they want. They LOVE it.  After they're done with their post they can't wait to read what other people wrote. Every writer wants someone to read their "stuff" and this is a great way for kids to have an audience for their work.

But, I'm waiting for the "block" to fall. Anything fun and interesting in education today is usually shut down as soon as the administration (dum de dum dum) gets wind of it. Until we're blocked though, the kids in room 15 can be found every Monday at a computer, writing, writing, writing.

Thursday, October 6, 2011

Dear Steve,

In the eighties when my children were small and I was a stay at home mom we bought our first personal computer.  I remember strange things like the fact that it cost $3500 and didn't come with a printer. I think it was an HP. I started a novel on it (never finished) but beyond that it seemed to me it didn't do much. My friend and I argued with her husband about how personal computers were useless and certainly not user-friendly. He had one of the first Apples but it didn't impress us. We couldn't foresee the day when the personal computer would be easy to use and the invention of the internet that would put the world at our finger tips.

The first Apple computers I encountered were the ones at my kids' school and then the ones at my own school. We loaded floppy discs into them to enable kids to word process and learn how to keyboard. I had a couple of the beige boxes in my classroom for kids to use. What was impressive was that children couldn't break them.  These early Apples were indestructible.  In my own house however, we continued to buy PC's because of the price and the fact that they were everywhere.  Apple was pretty small in those days and largely confined to the educational market as far as I knew. Obviously, I'm not a technological visionary.

We bought several PC's over the course of the next years. It took at least an hour of hooking up scores of cables to boot it up and then the tower was noisy and hot.  They all died of virus contamination eventually. One that my son owned even caught fire! But viruses and the software required to keep them out slowed down the computer enough that when you turned it on it took 10 minutes to boot up.  You could make and drink coffee in that time.  Many times in the middle of a project the PC simply froze and you couldn't do anything about it.  It wouldn't shut down, return to the program, nothing. Just that damned black screen. That was the worst thing about PC's, their unstable platforms. The toll the viruses and anti-virus software took on our checkbook was pretty irritating too.

Then one day a 17" iMac, still in the box, arrived in my classroom. It was a thing of beauty with all the software and hardware contained in the monitor.  It had a keyboard and a mouse and a cord.  Five minutes to plug it in and I was good to go.  I was in computer heaven.  Here was a device that did everything I wanted it to do. The internet was fast, the graphics outstanding, and it was QUIET and cool.  I was hooked.  Not too long after that I convinced my other half that we should have one.  We still have it in the den where not a single virus has plagued us. Nor do we have any anti-virus software to corrupt our hardware. Yes it was more expensive than a PC which was one of the reasons we had purchased PC's in the past. But the higher price has translated into a longer lasting device that has paid for itself. We've added more RAM and for a mere $30 updated the operating system.  I use a Mac internet service so I can work at home and access it at school on my idisk and vice versa. I was and am a convert.

Now I'm an Apple freak. I use my iPod everyday to listen to books and music while driving, exercising or just doing boring household chores. I hate to drive my husband's car because it lacks a dock for my iPod.  It stores loads of books and music and is reliable with a long lasting battery and plenty of functions. I also have a MacBook so I can shop while watching TV or write while sitting on the couch or in the kitchen as I am now. The battery life on this is amazing.  I even have an iPad that I took to Europe so I could keep in touch. As you might imagine, Apple products litter my family room.

True, every once in awhile I get what I call "the spinning wheel of death". That multi-colored wheel that tells the user the computer is working.  That's when the computer is "stuck".  On a Mac you just hold down the on and off button and it shuts down, ready to reboot in about 10 seconds. Pure genius.

I thank Apple for pulling me along with them into the computer age with aesthetically beautiful products designed for all kinds of users, even not so savvy ones like me.

Your vision will be missed.